Production planning in the process industry is today more complicated than ever. A manufacturing facility should not only output production in a certain period, but also ensure that each unit of production is produced with maximum profitability. Numerous factors, such as prices and availability of raw material and utilities, production demands for different products, equipment availability, etc., should therefore be taken under consideration before proceeding with any production plan.
Decisions have to be made under time pressure for a multitude of reasons, e.g., just-in-time production and delivery techniques, production upsets, raw material/energy curtailment, product type changes, planned/unplanned maintenance, etc. Managers and operators should evaluate each of these constraints before determining how best to operate each part of the manufacturing facility in order to meet the overall primary objective, e.g., minimize the overall production cost.
Raw material purchase agreement formulas, real-time-pricing of purchased electricity, self-generated energy, departmental rate change limitations, restricted buffer storage capacity, and recycle streams within the manufacturing facility add considerably to the complexity of the decision making process.
Manufacturing facilities in general do not have a way for truly optimized decision making. Conventional decision making is usually based on previous experience and rules-of-thumb. In most cases these decisions are made to provide short-term localized production targets without taking under consideration all the different alternatives, the impact on the entire manufacturing facility, and their affect in the final objective. As a result production unit cost minimization is not achieved and overall profits are not maximized.
Accordingly a need exists for a convenient, real-time method of providing easily accessible, truly optimized production decisions in continuous and semi-continuous manufacturing facilities.